Increasingly, online delivery of content has shifted to include more multimedia content integrated with or in place of static content. This online multimedia content can include, for example, audio and video content provided by a content provider, whether an individual or a business/organization.
To make content available for consumption, a content provider typically provides a website or portal through which the content can be accessed by a content consumer. To do so, the content provider may then edit and upload the content to a service or may host the content itself; however, typically a content consumer will access that content via a website, rendering the specific methods and devices used to store and provide the content obscured to the content consumer.
There are a number of drawbacks to this arrangement for both content consumers and content providers. First, it can be difficult for consumers of multimedia content to locate and use relevant content, for a number of reasons. For example, it is currently difficult to locate particular online hosted multimedia content unless the creator of that content includes relevant identifying information into the title, description, or other information associated with the piece of multimedia content. Even in such cases, that piece of multimedia content is described as a whole, rather than including a description of the various people, places, or discussions present in various subsections of the content. Furthermore, if information were to be added to the content, or if the content were to be subdivided into sections of interest for the consumer, that content would need to be reprocessed either beforehand or during the request for such content. Such content reprocessing would require use of substantial computing resources.
Second, and with respect to content providers, multimedia content is typically provided as a single item. This means that the content is uploaded as a whole and streamed, from beginning to end, to a content consumer when requested, even when the content consumer only wishes to watch a particular portion of the content. Content providers currently do not have an easy way to identify objects appearing in the content (e.g., people, places, and things), such that a user can individually search for and identify those objects, while concurrently allowing users to view/listen to the continuous whole piece of content. Furthermore, content providers cannot easily integrate or link other services to the multimedia content to a user, and cannot easily track usage of multimedia content or relationships between that content and other web-based information sought by a content consumer.
For these and other reasons, improvements are desirable.